


The Joy of Cooking

by victoria_p (musesfool)



Series: tumblr prompt fic [22]
Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: 5 Times, Cooking, Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 11:50:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17580272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p
Summary: "Cooking is like flying. Once you've got the basics down, you just do what feels right."





	The Joy of Cooking

**Author's Note:**

> For the January Journal meme, DW user name=skygiants requested Star Wars cooking headcanons and it turned out I had some thoughts that wanted to be fic. I've never written Kanan before so hopefully I didn't screw him up too badly.

**[one]**

Obi-Wan doesn't learn to cook until he's in exile on Tatooine, and he has to fend for himself. There's no Qui-Gon stirring a pot of bubbling stew over the stove in their shared quarters, no Anakin making nerf curry so hot it made Obi-Wan's eyes water and his nose run, or Ahsoka frying bacon in the galley on the _Negotiator_ because the clones never could deny her anything. He doesn't even have Cody pressing ration bars on him at all hours because he knows Obi-Wan forgets to eat when he's busy, and during the war, he's always busy.

When he drops Luke off with the Larses, Beru thanks him with a large tub of blue milk cheese and a loaf of sour brown bread to eat it with.

The cheese and bread run out more quickly than he expects, as do the ration bars shoved in the various pockets of his robes. He buys what he can at Pika Oasis and downloads a recipe book on their tenuous HoloNet connection. He learns to make bread with the coarse meal he buys there, and beans and rice, and a vinegary salad made from the tough greens they sell at Dannar's Claim. It suffices. He survives.

*

**[two]**

Anakin learns to cook at his mother's knee, fetching and carrying and begging to stir the pot or, on the rare occasions she makes something sweet, lick the spoon. He learns which spices will cover up the taste of meat that's past its prime and enhance the flavor of the small variety of vegetables and tubers Shmi is able to grow in a box beside her bed.

He's stunned when he enters the Jedi Temple and discovers meals are available to everyone in the cafeteria, that supplies are provided for those who wish to cook in their own quarters, and none of it costs them a credit. After a couple of weeks of being the center of attention in the cafeteria, Anakin decides cooking in their quarters is the easier choice. Obi-Wan eats whatever's put in front of him with little to no discernment, as far as Anakin can tell, and he'll just as happily eat ration bars as home-cooked food, so as he gets older and life gets busier, cooking falls by the wayside.

He cooks once or twice for Padme, who is suitably impressed. She can't even boil water. 

"Who has the _time_?" she asks laughingly, and Anakin kisses her, drinking her laughter in, and it's only when they smell the nuna bird stew burning that they remember they had a pot on the stove. He makes sure Threepio's recipe files are updated regularly, since he's usually the one who ends up cooking for her.

It's a small joy to share his cooking knowledge with Ahsoka, who wheedles the cook on the _Resolute_ into teaching her some basics. She has specific protein needs, and the men are always happy when she insists on steak for dinner. It makes up for the endless ration bars and nutrient paste meals they eat in the field.

He spends the last twenty-four years of his life eating nothing but nutrient paste fed to him from a tube in his mask. He's forgotten the taste of food, and the joy of cooking that went with it, just one more facet of his old life burned away in the fires of Mustafar.

*

**[three]**

Caleb Dume never learns to cook. 

Kanan Jarrus picks it up here and there, enough to make a living at it when smuggling and thievery don't work out. What he's really good at, though, is mixing drinks. Most of the dives he works in don't have much call for someone who knows how to make a Mind Eraser or a hot toddy, but when he's bored on slow afternoons, he reads an old datapad full of drink recipes with names like the Kashyyyk Kick and the Chandrilan Chaser and makes them for whichever locals are slumped over the bar at the moment. When his boss complains about him using up the good booze, he laughs, because it'll all go sour before any of these losers order anything but the rotgut they pass off as whiskey or the swill they call beer.

Kanan might have some opinions on the subject, even though he's no better than the drunks he looks down on—when he bends his elbow, which is often, he doesn't ask for anything fancy either.

It's not until he meets Hera and joins her crew that he starts cooking regularly. Meals become a highlight of their day, the four—five when Ezra joins them—sitting around the table, sharing food that they cooked themselves, and talking about their day. It's...good. It feels like home, like family, like everything he's missed since Order 66.

Ahsoka joins them once for breakfast; she stands over a frying pan spitting grease as she fries strips of bacon to crisp perfection while he makes pancakes on the portable griddle. They move around each other easily in the small galley, a familiar rhythm he hasn't felt in years. The smell of bacon reminds him of her after Malachor, and next time he makes it for the crew, it feels like one small way to keep her memory alive.

*

**[four]**

Leia learns to plan state functions early—the different sets of porcelain and silverware used for particular events or people, the dizzying dilemmas of seating charts, the variety of special meals tailored for various visitors. When she's thirteen, she spends an hour twice a week with the best sommelier in Aldera City, learning what wines pair best with which foods, and what aperitifs and digestives make for the best bookends of any meal.

She does not, however, learn to cook herself.

Once Alderaan is gone, she eats in the mess on whatever backwater base or command ship she's been assigned to, at first, but then Luke and Han do their weird friendly competitors thing and suddenly she's being cooked meals by one or the other more often than not. Luke's meals are hearty peasant food—she never calls it that, but that's what it is: stews and curries and soups that make basic ingredients stretch to feed a crowd, with enough spices to clear her sinuses and make her sweat.

Han cooks like he eats—grilled flatbreads stuffed with meat and cheese, nerf burgers that send pink juices running down her chin when she bites into them, and cold Corellian ale to wash it all down.

The ale is the perfect partner to the food, and it reminds Leia of those long-ago lessons. She shares them with both Han and Luke, though Han is the only one who's really interested. Threepio joins in sometimes; she shouldn't be surprised at how knowledgeable he is about throwing dinner parties, but she is. She sometimes wonders vaguely who programmed him with such a weird set of skills. As irritating as he can sometimes be, he's invaluable once the war is won and she's in office again.

While preparing for yet another dinner with the members of her party, she looks over the table set with snowy white linen and beautiful Pantoran crystal and wishes for Han's nerf burgers and fried potatoes in the grimy and worn synthleather seats of the _Falcon_ instead.

*

**[five]**

Poe learns to cook young, a gift from both his parents in the heady days after the Alliance wins and the Empire slowly disintegrates.

"Cooking is like flying," he explains to Finn and Rey in the small galley on the _Falcon_ , and then again in the larger kitchen once they set up a base on Florrum. "Once you've got the basics down, you just do what feels right."

Rey gets it pretty quickly—a dash of salt and a splash of oil and she's on her way. (It probably helps that she'll eat almost anything, but Finn doesn't say that out loud; she learns quickly, anyway, what's acceptable to serve others and keeps the more revolting dishes to herself.)

Finn doesn't get it. Even nutrition had been regimented in the First Order—you got enough to keep you healthy and no more. So this all seems haphazard to him—what exactly is a pinch, and whose taste is he seasoning to?

That's when Rose swoops in and offers to teach him to bake. "We didn't have much on Hays Minor," she says. "We didn't have anything, really. But we always had cake on our birthdays."

Baking makes sense to Finn. Weights and measures and a precisely heated oven for a specific length of time, and at the end, he has delicious cake, or cookies, or, when he starts getting brave, pie. Rey will eat anything, and Rose and Poe won't necessarily tell him if he makes something bad—they'll just say they don't like it, but everyone has different tastes. But he knows he's succeeded when Leia bites into the chocolate cake he's made to celebrate their latest victory and smiles wide. 

"This is good," she says, taking another mouthful. "You did good."

To Finn, that's even sweeter than the cake itself.

*


End file.
